Passport rules cause confusion, frustration at Canadian border

Les BlumenthalMcClatchy Newspapers

Published Sunday, July 01, 2007

WASHINGTON -- Joan Roberts carries her passport everywhere she goes. As the owner of Brewster's Restaurant along the Canadian border in Point Roberts, Wash., she crosses back and forth between the two countries at least twice a day.

As deadlines shift and Congress and the White House seem headed for a showdown over new border security regulations, Roberts says carrying her passport is the safest way to ensure she doesn't have any problems.

"There is a lot of confusion," she said. "It's very frustrating. I don't know what the answer is."

Roberts is not alone. From the Peace Bridge in upstate New York to the Detroit-Windsor tunnel in Michigan to the busy Blaine crossing in Washington state, the effort to tighten border security by requiring formal identification to enter the United States is causing uncertainty.

Congress says the Department of Homeland Security has bungled implementation of the new rules. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff says the problems, including a backlog of an estimated 3 million passport applications, are only a "hiccup," and the threat of terrorists crossing the borders is too great to delay the new rules.

Meanwhile, a pilot program in Washington state to offer new, enhanced driver's licenses as a form of border ID is attracting national attention. Washington will become the first state to offer such driver's licenses, and state officials say they could issue 300,000 in the first 18 months of the program.

Liz Luce, head of the Washington state Department of Licensing, said her department has received a lot of inquiries from other states.

"The Department of Homeland Security is encouraging other states to look at our pilot program," she said.

No one denies that there are security concerns along the Canadian and Mexican borders. Since 2005, Chertoff said, Customs and Border Protection officers have detained more than 60,000 individuals trying to cross the border with phony documents and fraudulent claims of U.S. citizenship. More than 8,000 different documents can be used to gain entry into the United States, but most people were admitted after simply telling border agents they were U.S. citizens.

All that is about to change. Though none of the terrorists involved in the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks crossed a land border into the United States, others have tried, including Ahmed Ressam, the millennium bomber who was captured by an alert border agent in Port Angeles, Wash. The Sept. 11 commission said travel documents were as important to terrorists as weapons and called for tighter border regulations.